July 16, 1982

As far back as anyone can remember, the elderly people have come out of their small apartments and their old houses to sit on park benches throughout the city in the heat of summer, and they still do. It may well be the ultimate urban scene. They sit along many of the roadways, such as Shore Parkway in Brooklyn and near the White Plains Road subway station on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. They sit on benches in the parks, near the Grecian Shelter in Prospect Park or along the pleasant pathways in Astoria Park, where the Triborough Bridge looms like a stage prop. They sit on the islands of Upper Broadway, among the red geraniums recently planted there. But the scene has been altered by something new and decidedly suburban: the aluminum and plastic lawn chair.

The Senate unanimously confirmed George P. Shultz today as the next Secretary of State, replacing Alexander M. Haig Jr. The 97-to-0 vote, with three Senators absent, occurred 24 hours after Mr. Shultz was unanimously approved by the Foreign Relations Committee. He is expected to be sworn in Friday at a White House ceremony attended by President Reagan. The committee had hoped to have Mr. Shultz confirmed by the full Senate on Wednesday night by getting the unanimous consent of the entire Senate to waive the usual minimum one-day delay. But Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, refused to go along, saying he wanted time to study the transcript of the hearing. Mr. Proxmire voted today for confirmation.

THE quintessential summer theater may be the Goodspeed Opera House. It is an 1876 building, lovingly restored; it is the home of musical revivals, lavishly produced. Its attraction now is ''High Button Shoes,'' the 1947 Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn-Stephen Longstreet musical, notable for its score, its dancing and its general jollity. In the second act, while the Keystone Kops chase a con man, a gorilla materializes, balletically, from a bathhouse. The Goodspeed audience stamps its tasseled loafers in approval. Outside, the sun is shining on the Connecticut River. It is what summer theater is all about. Summer attractions, however, are not necessarily confined to the musical, the larky or the effervescent. There are also the dramatic, the earnest and the moving. Elsewhere in Connecticut, for example, there is Shakespeare (somewhere or other in summer, there is always Shakespeare); there are also William Saroyan, Friedrich Durenmatt, Oscar Wilde and Simon Gray. Simon Gray's ''Molly'' is at the Long Wharf in New Haven. Strictly speaking, the Long Wharf is not a summer theater, although in summer it does attract summer vacationers, which makes it a kind of honorary summer theater. ''Molly'' stars Tammy Grimes, repeating a role she did at the Hudson Guild in New York in 1978. There was talk then about bringing ''Molly'' to Broadway; there is talk now about bringing it to Broadway. Consider this then as a summer tryout. Durrenmatt's ''Episode on an Autumn Evening'' and Saroyan's

CBS News said yesterday that it had violated some of its own rules of journalistic practice in a documentary last winter about Vietnam. Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News, said the violations had not undermined the central thesis of the program and ''CBS News stands by this broadcast.'' But he said the organization was creating a new position, vice president for news practices, ''to insure that our organization is fully conversant with CBS News standards and their importance to the credibility of journalism.'' He added that CBS was ''planning a future broadcast on the issues treated in the original broadcast.'' In a telephone interview, he said, ''We don't view this as a corrective broadcast'' but as a normal next step to follow up on the public interest in the Vietnam issues elicited by the initial program. Mr. Sauter's eight-page memorandum to his staff followed a six-week internal investigation of the program, ''The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,'' which was shown Jan. 23. The program charged that Gen. William C. Westmoreland and his officers had conspired to manipulate figures on enemy troop strength to mollify criticism of the war effort in Vietnam.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt called today for a meeting of Arab leaders ''to agree on a unified policy for solving'' the Palestinian problem. He also urged Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to recognize each other's existence and called on the United States to ''open a dialogue with the Palestinians.'' Mr. Mubarak, who spoke at a news conference after meeting with the visiting West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, said today that he would go anywhere in search of Arab unity. Previously he had said he would not attend any conference in an Arab capital that did not have diplomatic relations with Egypt.